More on Accelerationism

I have recently, without having planned to in advance, found myself giving talks on the subject of accelerationism. First there was an “Introduction to Accelerationism” that I gave as a talk at Grand Valley State University. The video is here. And then, this past week, I gave a talk at the e-flux “Escape Velocity” symposium. What follows is the text of the latter talk. Long-time readers of this blog may recognize that the last portion of the talk actually recycles something that I initially published on the blog seven or eight years ago, and that is an extract from my still unfinished manuscript The Age of Aesthetics (which I swear I intend to return to and finish at some point…). The text that I present here is mostly complete, but there are a few points where I just have notes to myself, which I filled in more or less well while speaking.

In his science fiction novel Pop Apocalypse, Lee Konstantinou imagines the existence of a “Creative Destruction” school of Marxist-Leninist thought. The adherents of this school “interpret Marx’s writings as literal predictions of the future, so they consider it their mission to help capitalist markets spread to every corner of the world, because that’s the necessary precondition for a truly socialist revolution.” This means that the Creative Destruction Marxists are indistinguishable, in terms of actual practice, from the most ruthless capitalists. In the novel, their actions coincide with those of a group of investors who have concluded that “there’s money to be made off the destruction of the world,” and that in fact apocalyptic destruction constitutes “an unprecedented business opportunity.” They therefore seek to precipitate a worldwide nuclear conflagration: “On behalf of our investors, we’re obligated to take every step we can to insure that we corner the Apocalypse market before anyone else does.”

Let us take this satire as a preliminary parable of capitalism and accelerationism. Benjamin Noys, who actually coined the term accelerationism, does indeed present it somewhat like this, as “an exotic variant of la politique du pire: if capitalism generates its own forces of dissolution then the necessity is to radicalise capitalism itself: the worse the better.” But perhaps Noys’ critique is a bit unfair. Accelerationism is a new response to the specific conditions of today’s neoliberal, globalized and networked, capitalism. But it is solidly rooted in traditional Marxist thought. Marx himself writes both of capitalism’s revolutionary effects, and of the contradictions that render it unviable. On the one hand, Marx and Engels write in the Manifesto that capitalism is characterized by

Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation… All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

Note the way that capitalism’s relentless “revolutionizing” of technologies and social relations also revolutionalizes our self-understanding. As capitalism shakes up the material basis of life, it also demystifies and disenchants; it destroys all of the old mythical explanations and legitimations that were previously used to justify our place in society, and in the cosmos. We are left, as Ray Brassier puts it, with a world in which “intelligibility has become detached from meaning.” My difference with Brassier on this point is that he attributes the demystification of old narratives to some supposed “normative ideal of explanatory progress,” when in fact it is, as Marx says, a consequence of capitalism’s overwhelming development of productive forces. This does not mean that science, in practice, is in any sense arbitrary or “socially constructed.” But it does suggest that any talk of the alleged power of inferential links in the logical space of reasons is itself little more than a post hoc rationalization — rather than any sort of actual explanation of the way that science works. We ought to be as wary of Sellarsian neo-rationalism as we are of the meaning-laden narratives the Brassier so categorically dismisses.

In any case, Marx refuses to separate the radically liberatory effects of the “constant revolutionizing of production” from its creation of vast human misery. He insists that these go together, precisely because the development of capitalism is beset by severe internal contradictions. These contradictions are both the reason why capitalist development is not benign, and why it cannot be the ultimate horizon of history or of technological invention. In particular, Marx emphasizes the violent contradiction between the forces of production unleashed by capitalism, and the relations of production that organize it. The discordance between these, he insists, must lead to its downfall:

The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production which has flourished alongside and under it. The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, I will point out that Marx’s diagnosis of the maladies of capitalism has been amply confirmed by subsequent events; even though his vision of a movement beyond capitalism has never come to pass. In today’s neoliberal, globalized network society, “the monopoly of capital” has indeed become “a fetter upon the mode of production.” We can see this in all sorts of ways. Insane austerity programs transfer more wealth to the already-rich at the price of undermining living standards (not to mention spending ability) for the population as a whole. The privatization of formerly public services, and the expropriation of formerly common resources, undermine the very infrastructures that are essential for long-term survival. “Digital rights management” and copy protection restrict the flow of data, and cripple the power of the very technologies that make them possible in the first place. Ubiquitous surveillance by both corporate and governmental entities, and the consequent consolidation of Big Data, leads to stultification at precisely those points where the ruling ideology calls for “flexibility” and “creativity.” Investment is increasingly directed toward derivatives and other arcane financial instruments; the more these claim to comprehend the future by pricing “risk,” the more thoroughly they move away from any grounding in actual (and short-term, much less profitable) productive activity. And of course, massive environmental deterioration results from the way that actual energetic expenditures are written off by businesses as so-called “externalities.”

And yet, none of these contradictions have caused the system to collapse, or even remotely menaced its expanded reproduction. Instead, capitalism perpetuates itself through a continual series of readjustments. Nearly all of us, as individuals, have suffered from these blockages and degradations; but Capital itself has not. Despite the fact that we have reached a point where capitalist property relations have become an onerous “fetter upon the mode of production” that they initially helped to put into motion, this fetter shows no sign of being lifted. The intensification of capitalism’s contradictions has not lead to an explosion, or to any “negation of the negation.” The “capitalist integument” has failed to “burst asunder”; instead, it has calcified into a rigid carapace, well-nigh suffocating the life within.

Accelerationism is best understood as an attempt to respond to this dilemma. On the one hand, we have massive dialectical contradictions that, nonetheless, do not lead to any sublation, or “negation of the negation” such as Marx — in this respect at least, all too faithfully following Hegel — envisioned. On the other hand, and at the same time, actually existing capitalism has in fact brought us to the point where — perhaps for the first time in human history since the invention of agriculture — such a supersession is at least conceivable. With its globe-spanning technologies, its creation and use of an incredibly powerful computation and communications infrastructure, its mobilization of general intellect, and its machinic automation of irksome toil, contemporary capitalism really has produced the conditions for universal affluence. In the world today, there is already enough accumulated wealth, and sufficiently advanced technology, for every human being to lead a life of leisure and self-cultivation. As William Gibson famously said, “the future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

We should not underestimate the significance of this. In principle at least (even if not in fact) we have solved the economic problem — just as John Maynard Keynes, writing in 1930, predicted we would do within a century. “This means,” Keynes added, “that the economic problem is not — if we look into the future — the permanent problem of the human race.” Instead, Keynes predicted,

for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem — how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.

What the Bloomsbury aesthete Keynes foresaw as the outcome of capitalism — assuming, of course, “the euthanasia of the rentier,” which Keynes hoped would happen gradually, and without a revolution — differs little from the socialism imagined by Charles Fourier and Oscar Wilde, among others. They both saw general affluence as the necessary condition for human beings to be able to flourish, cultivating their individuality or their passions. Keynes’ vision is not even all that far from the communism described by Marx himself in his early writings: a society which “makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.”

This seemingly old-fashioned (19th-century aesthete) view of self-cultivation can be connected, not only to late Foucault, but also to the whole question of becoming posthuman.

But of course, the rentier has not gradually faded away; nor has the capitalist organization of production been overturned either by reform or by revolutionary upheaval. In other words, the Hegelian dialectic has definitively failed. The real is unquestionably not rational. Hegelian dialectics is not adequate to describe the delirious, irrational “logic” of capital — even though Marx himself originally analyzed this “logic” with Hegelian categories. For our experiences of the past century have taught us that, the worse its own internal contradictions get, the more fully capitalism is empowered. Marx wrote that “capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” But in fact, capital is even more monstrous than this. For it is actively auto-cannibalistic. It feeds, not only on living labor, but also upon itself. As David Harvey reminds us, Marx envisions “the violent destruction of capital, not by relations external to it, but rather as a condition of its self-preservation.” When profit rates decline, then vast conflagrations of value — whether in wars or in economic crises — allow the accumulation of capital to resume anew. The lesson is that capitalism is never undone by its own internal contradictions. Rather, capitalism both needs and uses these contradictions; it continually regenerates itself by means of them, and indeed it could not survive without them.

In other words, we cannot hope to negate capitalism, because capitalism itself mobilizes a far greater negativity than anything we could hope to mount against it. The dirty little secret of capitalism is that it produces abundance, but also continually transforms this abundance into scarcity. It has to do so, because it cannot endure its own abundance. Again and again, as Marx and Engels say in the Manifesto, “there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production.” The wealth that capitalism actually produces undermines the scarcity that remains its raison d’etre. For once scarcity has been overcome, there’s nothing left to drive competition. The imperative to expand and intensify production simply becomes absurd. In the face of abundance, therefore, capitalism needs to generate an imposed scarcity, simply in order to keep itself going. This is the irrational turn that Keynes missed, in his all-too-rational hope for capitalistically-generated affluence. And this is why Deleuze and Guattari, in the notorious and much-quoted passage that is the ur-text of accelerationism, urge us

to go further still… in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization… For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to ‘accelerate the process,’ as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet.

This passage has in fact been taken out of context, and interpreted much more broadly than I think Deleuze and Guattari ever intended. For the statement only makes sense in the light of their overall understanding of how scarcity under capitalism “is never primary,” but rather “is created, planned, and organized in and through social production.” More specifically, they say that scarcity “is counterproduced as a result of the pressure of antiproduction” arising from Capital as the socius, or monstrous “body without organs” of social being.

The larger point here is that political economy needs to be understood first of all in terms of abundance instead of scarcity. The classical economics of Smith and especially Ricardo, and after them Marx, and revived in the 20th century by Sraffa, was concerned with social production, distribution, and expenditure. These political economists asked how a society could materially reproduce itself, as well as how it could grow by generating a surplus. And they were therefore concerned with the management and distribution of such a surplus. But neoclassical economics, ever since the late 19th century, and especially today, has a very different set of concerns. It deals, not with the problem of surplus, but with the problem of scarcity. It asks how individuals make decisions, given limited resources. Rather than noticing that we in fact have more than we can use, neoclassical economics insists that we are bedeviled by infinite desires and only finite means. This mimics the way in which capitalism must suppress the very abundance it produces, by subjecting it to an imposed scarcity.

Keynes also opposes the argument from scarcity:

Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes-those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they. But this is not so true of the absolute needs — a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.

This can also be linked to self-fashioning, in opposition to the 19th/20th century idea of infinite desire.

In the latter part of the twentieth century, Keynesian policies were replaced by neoliberal ones — precisely because the latter are premised upon the imposition of a universal requirement for competition in all areas of life. over scarce resources, as Foucault was the first to note.

This is a question for environmental considerations as well. Do we think in terms of resource scarcity, which would mean that we must learn to live with less? Or do we understand our destruction of the biosphere, our causing mass extinctions, etc., as a kind of imposed scarcity (in contrast, perhaps, to the Bataillean overabundance and sheer gift of solar energy?). General economy needs to be decoupled from fictions of the infinitude of desire.

Everything I have said so far about contradictions and going further needs to be understood in terms of one of the most contentious doctrines in Marxism, that of the fall of the rate of profit. Although Marx refers to “laws” of capitalist political economy; but he also says that these laws are tendential ones. The “the law of the tendential fall of the rate of profit” (Gesetz des tendenziellen Falls der Profitrate). There are many countervailing factors to any tendency. The tendency is real in itself; it is a part of the present situation. But because of the countervailing factors, there is no guarantee that the tendency will actually happen.

What Marx calls a tendency has some similarities to what Deleuze calls the virtual. Both are fully real, without being entirely actual. It is a question of futurity. Science fiction articulates the futurity that already exists as a virtual component of the present. It grasps both technology and socio-politico-economic organization.

Among all its other accomplishments, neoliberal capitalism has also robbed us of the future. It turns everything into an eternal present. The highest values are supposedly novelty, innovation, and creativity, and yet these always turn out to be more of the same. The future exists only in order to be colonized and made into an investment opportunity. The genuine unknowability of the future is transformed, by means of derivatives trading, into a matter of calculable risk. I am haunted by the condition of what Mark Fisher calls capitalist realism, in which — as Fisher puts it, channeling Jameson and Zizek — “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” In this way, accelerationism is an attempt to answer a problem of imagination, no less than than a problem of economics.

Deleuze and Guattari’s reconceptualization of capitalism was of course picked up in the 1990s by the British philosopher Nick Land. Land pushes the deterritorializing schizophrenia of D & G to the maximum, while dropping the anti-capitalist rhetoric. Instead, Land celebrates absolute deterritorialization as liberation, to the point of total disintegration and death. He sees Capital as an alien force that exceeds and ruptures the human; but he celebrates this destructive force (whereas Marxists denounce it; and defenders of capitalism deny that such is the case).

Land offers a science-fictional view of capitalism. But he identifies with Capital itself — against human beings, or any other sort of organic life. This picks up the monstrosity of Capital as body without organs or socius. But do we need therefore to identify with it, against ourselves? Land develops a kind of Stockholm Syndrome with regard to capital. Contrast the way Hardt and Negri try to reclaim the multitude as a monstrosity that the ruling order has always tried to repress. But they are wrong and Land is right; it is really Capital that is excessive and monstrous. Of course, we cannot remain the same and deal with this monstrosity. In order to survive the monstrosity of capital, let alone flourish under it or despite it, we need to change. This is where we become posthuman.

Paul De Filippo’s science fiction short story “Phylogenesis” deals directly with this situation. The story is an accelerationist one, in the way that it pushes to the end of the full monstrosity of the body of Capital, and especially of the ecological catastrophe that is one of its most important consequences. “Phylogenesis” is a story about living on in the face of monstrosity.

The literal premise of “Phylogenesis” is that an alien species of enormous “invaders came to Earth from space without warning… In blind fulfillment of their life cycle, they sought biomass for conversion to more of their kind.” As a result, “the ecosphere had been fundamentally disrupted, damaged beyond repair.” The invaders’ massive predation leaves the earth a barren, ruined mass: “the planet, once green and blue, now resembled a white featureless ball, exactly the texture and composition of the [invading species].” Human beings are reluctant to accept the hard truth that they cannot repel the invasion: “only in the final days of the plague, when the remnants of mankind huddled in a few last redoubts, did anyone admit that extermination of the invaders and reclamation of the planet was impossible.” The human agenda is reset at the last possible moment: with victory unattainable, sheer survival becomes the only remaining goal. In this situation of general dispossession, there is no longer any environment capable of sustaining humanity. It is necessary, instead, “to adapt a new man to the alien conditions.”

And so the “chromosartors” get to work, genetically refashioning Homo sapiens into a new species. We are reborn as viral parasites, living within the very bodies of the spacefaring invaders. On the outside, the host presents a smooth surface: it is a “tremendous glaucous bulk,” with skin “like a bluish-gray compound of fat and plastic,” possessed of “a relatively high albedo,” and shaped like a “featureless ovoid.” The host, just like Deleuze and Guattari’s body without organs, “presents its smooth, slippery, opaque, taut surface as a barrier.” But beneath this surface, Deleuze and Guattari tell us, the body without organs “senses there are larvae and loathsome worms… so many nails piercing the flesh, so many forms of torture.” Or, as Di Filippo tells the story, a whole ecology pullulates beneath “the sleek uniformity of the host’s thick skin.” Its “interior structure” is “a labyrinth of cells and arteries, nerves and organs, structural tubules and struts… A nonhomogeneous environment of wet and dry spaces, some cluttered with pulsing conduits and organs, some home to roving organelles, others like the empty caverns formed in foam.” And this is where the genetically refashioned human species takes up residence.

Most of the text of “Phylogenesis” lovingly recounts the physiology, psychology, and overall life cycle of the new parasitic humanity. The bioengineering is precise and efficient. Everything is optimized in accordance with the physiology and metabolism of the host, and in the interest of flexibility. Anything deemed superfluous to survival is unsentimentally jettisoned. The “neohumans” mate quickly, reproduce in great numbers (in “litters” of five or more), and mature rapidly. They exhibit both swarm behavior — ganging up together when necessary to overwhelm the host’s defenses — and nomadic distribution — “scattering themselves throughout the interior of the gargantuan alien” to reduce the chances of being all wiped out at once by the host’s counterattacks. Once they have killed their host, they go into hibernation within “protective vesicles,” in order to survive the vacuum of deep space until they can encounter another host. In this way, they are able to perpetuate both their genes and their cultural heritage. Since they unavoidably “possess a basically nonmaterial culture,” they only use light-weight technologies that have been interiorized within their bodies. They are especially gifted with “mathematical skill,” including a genetically-instilled “predisposition toward solving… abstruse functions in their heads.” Aesthetically, they are all masters and lovers of song, “the only art form left to the artifact-free neohumans.” Mathematics and music are the sole “legacy of six thousand years of civilization” that has been bequeathed to them. The lives of the neohumans are short and intermittent; they are “mayflies, fast-fading blooms, the little creatures of a short hour. Yet to themselves, their lives still tasted sweet as of old.”

We can see Di Filippo’s story as an allegory of capitalist realism and accelerationism. The story turns upon devising a brilliant strategy for adapting to catastrophic monstrosity. When “There Is No Alternative” — when it no longer seems possible for us to defeat the monstrous invasion, or even to imagine things otherwise — Di Filippo’s parasitic inversion is the best that we can do. The neohumans of “Phylogenesis” evade extinction at the hands of the monstrous aliens, by devising a situation in which their own survival absolutely depends upon the continuing survival of the monstrosities as well. The parasitic neohumans end up killing whatever host they have invaded; but their continuing proliferation is always contingent upon encountering another host. The extinction of the invaders would mean their own definitive extinction as well.

As far as I can determine, Di Filippo never intended “Phylogenesis” to be read as an allegory of Capital. Yet the traces are there, in every aspect of the story. The downsizing of the neohumans (adults are “four feet tall, with limbs rather gracile than muscular”), the rationalization of their design in the interest of mobility and flexibility, their uncanny coordination and ability to “monitor the passage of time with unerring precision, thanks to long-ago modifications in the suprachiasmatic nuclei of their brains, which provided them with accurate biological clocks,” the “inbuilt determinism” by means of which their sexual drives are canalized “for a particular purpose,” their severely streamlined cultural heritage, and the ways that even their nonproductive activities (singing and nonprocreative sex) serve a purpose as “supreme weapons in the neohumans’ armory of spirit”: all these are recognizable variations of familiar management techniques in the contemporary post-Fordist regime of flexible accumulation. The neohumans make use of the only tools that they find at hand; they parasitize and mimic the very mechanisms that have dispossessed them.

The emotional lives of the neohumans are effectively streamlined in a post-Fordist manner as well. Feeling an overwhelming sense of loss, and aware of all the ways that their potential has been constrained, these people nonetheless conclude that “we just have to make the most of the life we have.” As for the prospect of these monstrous hosts ever going away, “we can’t count on it, we can’t even dream about it.” Both socially and affectively, Di Filippo’s neohumans are thus the very image of the multitude invoked by Hardt and Negri, and even more explicitly by Paolo Virno. They exercise a genuine creativity under extremely straightened circumstances; and they produce, and themselves enjoy, an experience of the common. But Di Filippo recognizes, more clearly than Virno or Hardt and Negri do, the limitations of any “mobilization of the common” in our current situation of the “real subsumption” of labor (and forms of life more generally) under capitalism. “Phylogenesis” is a demonstration of a kind of vitalism in spite of capital, but that is also the reslience that neoliberalism demands (cf. Robin James on this): “Life is tenacious, life is ingenious, life is mutable, life is fecund.”